Some pointers for computer troublebombarding …

1) QTParted – free software for resizing partitions (it can handle NTFS partitions) found in Knoppix Free CD.
2) Vista Recovery CD – available at http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-vista-recovery-disc-download/.
3) Broken exe associations – sometimes you may find all your shortcuts are behaving weird. You double click them and it asks you to indicate the program with which to open it. Well sometimes running them as Administrator works but this is a temporary solution. It may happen that even regedit or msconfig is not found when you type it at start! But dont panic – go directly to their location – search in C:\WINDOWS and right click on them and click “Run as Administrator”. So you can open the cmd prompt this way (CMD.EXE) and run a command like regedit or msconfig. Then to fix the broken exe associations you need to slightly tweak the registry. Read about it here – http://filext.com/faq/broken_exe_association.php.

It is good to have these handy – keep a copy of the softwares on a CD and a printout of the document. They can save hours of your time (and lot of sanity) sometimes.